Barracuda: Final Bearing

Phillips proceeded to work his way south, on toward Tokyo Bay, uncertain what the hell he would do when he got there.

USS BARRACUDA

The ship was dead quiet, the way Porter liked it. There was something special to him about the midwatch, the officers in their racks, the captain and admiral sawing logs, the enlisted men bedded down, every space deserted except for the watchstanders. Porter scanned the sonar repeater screen, able to send it through every display that Chief Omeada had forward in sonar. Nothing on the displays. The sea was deserted.

Or was it? He felt an electricity, the same he had felt before on both good and bad occasions. He’d felt it the day before he got his acceptance letter from the academy.

And the Thursday night before the Friday he met his first serious girlfriend Diane. He’d begun to think this tingle of premonition could only mean good things, but he’d also felt it the week before he and his roommate Todd had gone skydiving. He had piled into Todd’s ‘02 two-seat T-bird with the retro tailfins and they had gone out to the field, packed their chutes, saddled up and gone up in the Cessna. As usual, at 14,000 feet he and Todd had left the plane, goofing off all the way down until the altimeter buzzed at 3000 feet and he pulled the ripcord, the mattress-shaped parasail deploying above him and jerking him up by the crotch. He smiled with the sheer joy of flying without wings — until he saw Todd in trouble.

The trip down from 3000 feet under canopy took him six minutes. It took Todd seventeen seconds. Todd’s main chute had deployed automatically instead of by his ripcord, the altimeter rigged to do that at 900 feet in the event that the jumper failed to pull before 3000 feet, but it had malfunctioned, and at the time Todd was doing body barrel rolls, still goofing off, so that the main chute wrapped around his neck and extended up into the slipstream, his rolling body turning the silk of the parachute into a death shroud. He fell like that, choking on the cords of the chute wrapped around his throat, looking like a tumbling cocoon, until he impacted the ground on a patch of concrete driveway.

After that the tingle was on Porter’s black list. The next time he felt it was the October of his first class year at Annapolis. For two days he sweated, wondering what would happen this time, until the company commander had called him to his office for a phone call. Who died? was all Porter could think when he picked up the phone. The voice at the other end said his grandfather had passed on after a stroke hit him an hour before.

They buried his grandfather in his native Wyoming, in a grave yard with cactus and sagebrush, the walks made of river stones, facing a mountain ridge. It had been a beautiful ceremony, and Porter had to smile at the memory of his grandfather’s jokes. He had thought that had been the meaning of the tingle, but the feeling of premonition stayed with him even the day after the funeral, up to the moment they read the will.

Grandfather had left Porter a defunct gold mine in South Africa, a bit of a family joke, but the week before his death the old man’s mining company had found platinum in the mine. Porter’s net worth grew from a few thousand dollars — the price of his five-year-old sports car — to several million overnight. Actually, by the year before, the estimate had been found to be low, the mine potential estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars. None of that changed Porter, none of it seemed to reach him. No one outside the family even knew about the mine. Porter didn’t really believe it until he made a trip there to see it with his own eyes. But the role of rich kid wasn’t of interest. He was, he thought, put on earth for something different, and it had nothing to do with money. The next and last time Porter had felt the odd tingle was days before, when Barracuda had been heading for the Japan’oparea.

Something was happening to the ship. Hours later the message came that the ship was to rendezvous with a helicopter to receive a visitor.

Admiral Pacino himself. Kane had been angry, his kingdom invaded, but somehow Porter felt this was the positive side of premonition. Whatever, in the admiral’s presence he felt it biting at him. And now, timed with the takeover of his watch, the old tingle was hitting him full force.

This was the day. This was the watch. If only he could tell if it was a good portent, or a bad one.

SS-810 WINGED SERPENT

Lt. Comdr. Seiichi Kami had the section-A watch in the control room. For the last two hours, since midnight, he had stared at the same consoles, looking at the same displays, all of them empty. The hours since the sinkings of the first Americans had been filled with both boredom and tension. Boredom because the screens were empty.

Tension because the Americans still hadn’t given up.

The Americans, Kami decided, were doing this on purpose, trying to exhaust them before coming back into the area with more submarines.